Bibliography: leaves 72-75. / Through a selection of material written by Italians in South Africa, this study aims to discuss the difficulties and challenges faced by Italian emigrant writers in representing their identity. The study places itself in the context of other studies in the field of i/emigrant, minority and ethnic studies in as much as the body of work, similarly to i/emigrant texts written in other parts of the world, has been to date considered of marginal significance or has not been examined at all. This study instead considers the opportunities of analysis that texts such as these represent and offers motivations for the need to engage with them. To analyse these texts offers the possibility to observe the relative status of the reader/critic and also to be open to the process of identity creation which does not exist in a vacuum but rather through the exchange and relations held between people of different linguistic, socio-political, historical and cultural backgrounds. With specific regard to material written by Italians in South Africa, an area in which research has up to now been fairly limited, it is argued that the tendency is for writers to emphasise a nationalistic and patriotic definition of Italian identity. This is in part as a result of the pressure emigrants face when confronted by their new cultural, linguistic and geographic setting. The tendency towards patriotic and nationalistic sentiment has also been encouraged during specific moments of Italy's history, and that is, the years leading up to Italy's unification and declaration of its nationhood status (the Risorgimento) and during fascism. The texts analysed are a letter (dated 1833) of a settler to the Cape, one Rocco Catoggio; the war time diary (published in a literary and political Italian newspaper in 1901) by a certain Camillo Ricchiardi, a volunteer and Boer sympathiser during the South African War (1889 - 1902); newspaper articles published by Italian Prisoners of War in the Zonderwater Camp during the Second World War and the biography and chronology by Adolfo G. Bini on the history of Italians in South Africa.

Bibliography: pages 124-132. / This study explores the symptoms of alienation witnessed in Indian characters and the healing they achieve through myth in three contemporary American Indian novels. In James Welch's historical novel, Fools Crow, I explore the methods through which Welch tells the story of Fools Crow. I draw comparisons between oppositions such as oral and written language, oral and written history, and history and narrative. I examine the ideas of many theorists, including Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy and Hayden White's inquiry into historiography in Tropics of DiscouT'Se. My conclusions suggest that myth is the foundation of history and that Welch effectively uses myth to rehabilitate Fools Crow. Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony presents its main character, Tayo, as alienated. He operates in a confusing world of dualities whereby the hegemonic culture brutalizes a feminine universe, and the counter-culture embraces a feminine universe. This study of Ceremony necessitates exploring the differences between Indian and Euro-American perceptions of landscape. Greta Gaard's studies on ecofeminism and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality help to focus the theories v presented in this chapter. In addition, I consider the opposition between European patriarchal and American Indian matriarchal cultures, a difference that may affect the way the two cultures perceive the landscape. Finally I look at the Laguna captivity narrative that heals Tayo and compare the Laguna captivity genre to Euro-American captivity tales. The juxtaposition of cultural captivity narrative types reveals further differences in Laguna and Euro-American perceptions of the land. Annette Kolodny's theories on landscape and feminism prove useful in focusing my conclusions. N. Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child explores the parameters of representation and struggles with the question of how an Indian author can effectively describe the condition of an alienated American Indian to an audience who is, for the most part, Euro-American. This novel ties together many of the themes explored in Fools Crow and Ceremony. Momaday shows myth as originating in oral language and oral language as invented by vision: The story's main character, Set, has to overcome his alienation by understanding the origin of a myth which exists in his 'racial memory.' As an Indian, Set must discover the importance of non-textual spatiality and not the spaces contained within and influenced by written texts such as the very one Momaday creates to depict this character. The term non-textual spatiality refers to the imaginative space created by oral language and myth and the notion of non-textual spatiality opens a path for Set's healing. W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory and Nelson Goodman's Languages of A rt are the main critical studies I use to amplify theories that grow out of The Ancient Child.

Bibliography: leaves 103-108. / Were the social activity that most defines late capitalism to be named consumption would be nominated as the predominant leisure pastime of the current period. Since the well-being of a society is measured along material co-ordinates, high rates of consumption are taken as signs of an overall prosperity wherein individuals are not only economically empowered but also endowed with the putative right to express their multifarious subjectivities. Yet the reality of consumption despite consolidated efforts to assert the contrary effects a far more degraded picture than the phantasmagorical one that is widely propagated. Often treated as a neutral sphere isolated from a productionist context, consumption is a spectacle which is reflective of but hides a subterranean structure of capital accumulation. This dissertation will consequently address the manner in which capitalism has shaped the arena of consumption exemplified through the changes undergone by the commodity and argue that consumption is best understood within a framework of the political economy.

Bibliography: pages 112-114. / In the following dissertation, I have undertaken to explore the very wide-ranging yet largely unexplored territory of Irish cinema. I have confined my study to the 1990s (other than a brief overview of the Irish film industry in my Introduction) in an attempt to express the revolutionary global success that all aspects of Irish culture have experienced in this decade. The central point, which I reiterate throughout the dissertation, is that, while Irish filmmakers are increasingly concerned with defining "Irishness" for themselves and the world, they inevitably encounter much confusion and ambivalence, and are often criticised for it. For this reason, I have uncovered many ambiguities in the films I have watched, which defy strict categorisation, other than in terms of their settings, which I describe in terms of "war-torn Belfast", modern Dublin and "the rural idyll". Nonetheless, I have divided the essay into three main sections, other than the Introduction and Conclusion, which themselves contain subsections, and which encompass the major themes which recur in Irish films. Section Two is a broad study of those films which deal with the political violence, known as the Troubles, that defines Northern Ireland. This includes a stereotyped American portrayals as well as a more recent IRA bias, beginning with Neil Jordan's attempt to put a new version of history on film in Michael Collins. The conclusion I come to is that filmmakers are ultimately trying to provide a balanced view of the situation and one that condemns violence. Section Three deals with the intertwined themes of women, family, sexuality and the Catholic Church. The traditional conservatism in Ireland is outlined before I show how recent films reflect the changes in moral attitudes and the new freedoms of sexuality that the younger generation is experiencing. Lastly I look at the special situation of women in the North, where they and their families are the long-suffering victims of the violence. Section Four continues the theme of the changes which are sweeping over "Modern Ireland", largely due to its opening-up to outside influences, particularly those of America. The dichotomies of this newly-modernised society are still evident, as I discuss in the section on the historical importance of land, which is expressed not only in the "rural idyll" films, but in those which deal with the move to the urban lure and squalor of Dublin. Finally I look at how the traditional and mythical still exist in modern Ireland, and how the combination of these aspects of the past and present is shown to suggest a positive way into the future.

No description available.

Through consideration of Bessie Head's fiction and essays, the paper that follows investigates Head's use of fiction to challenge the hegemony of South African history, a history that fails to represent black South Africans except as "objects of abuse and exploitation" (Head, A Woman Alone 66). The absence of a subject position in history for black South Africans betokens a need for critical reevaluation of the structures and language of that history. History should document and create a people's identity; however, Head contends that South African historical discourse has obliterated the historical identity of black South Africans. The imaginative freedom that fiction allows provides Head with a radical means for reinscribing an alternative historical identity. Through four interrelated sections, then, this paper describes and evaluates the way in which Head's works challenge existing historical discourse by working through literature to establish an alternative set of historical structures. The Botswana land, offers Head, a space for experimentation with writing styles that evade reproducing an account of historical oppression and also for the practical construction of a new world. This construction includes agricultural reform that would give power over the forces of production to the workers of the land and which would in turn provide these workers with both economic and spiritual independence. The novels, however, display an incongruous duality wherein the construction of Head's new world is interfered with by the dominating voice of South African history. Hence, the subject and the problem of the novels becomes a conflict for the authority of history. Head's efforts towards constructing a new world also seek to implement women as a primary labor force in both material and creative production, thereby further challenging a history that has rendered women as sexual commodities. The Collector of Treasures offers a culmination of this conflict. Here, Head offers a strategy of narrative fragmentation interrelated with a dialogic, multi-voiced discourse that dismantles the single-voiced structure of a history determined by the politics of repression. Fiction offers a freedom of structure and thought unavailable to the historian; therefore fiction transgresses the boundaries created by a repressive history and is able to establish an original and self-sustaining historical world.

No description available.

This project highlights the role of locally produced children's written literature for ages six to fourteen in postcolonial Nigeria as a catalyst for national transformation in the wake of colonial rule. My objective is to reveal the perceived possibilities and pitfalls contained in Nigerian children's literature (specifically books published between 1960 and 1990), for the promotion of a new national consciousness through the reintegration of traditional values into a contemporary context. To do this, I draw together children's literature written by Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and Mabel Segun in order to illustrate the emphasis Nigerian children's book authors writing within the postcolonial moment placed on the concepts of nation and national identity in the aim to 'refashion' the nation. Following from this, I examine the role of the child reader in relation to the adult authors' intentions and pose the question of what the role of the female is in the authors' imagining of a 'new nation'. The study concludes by reflecting on the persistent under-scrutiny of children's literature in Africa by academics and critics, a preconception that still exists today. I move to suggest further research on the genre not only to stimulate an increased production of children's literature more conscious in content and aware of the needs of its young, (male and female) African readership, but also to incite a change in attitude toward the genre as one that is as deserving of interest as its adult counterpart.

In this paper I discuss the relation between Olive Schreiner's social context and the form of her fictional writing. It is not intended as an interpretation of her work but rather represents a preliminary sketch of the social and political discourses which structured her environment. I suggest that for Olive Schreiner writing is not a means of representing a given reality. Instead writing itself is a constitutive act through which she attempts to articulate a subject which expresses the conflicts and contradictions of its social and political location. In the first section of the paper, I discuss Olive Schreiner's position as a woman in relation to the literary canon. I argue that the social discourses of femininity in the late nineteenth century attempted to exclude women from the realm of cultural and intellectual production. Looking at the work of Herbert Spencer, the influential social philosopher who used scientific principles as the basis for his ideas about social order, I analyse the way in which Olive Schreiner rewrites his theory in order to make a space for women as cultural producers. In the second section I look at the dominant forms of the novel available to Olive Schreiner. The dominant mode of representation for metropolitan writers was the realist novel and women writers such as George Eliot found it an extremely effective way of articulating their experiences. The other significant form of writing for Olive Schreiner was the colonial adventure story, the most popular way, in the nineteenth century, of representing the colonial space. I suggest that Olive Schreiner's rejection of both these forms and her choice of the allegorical mode, can be understood in terms of the specificity of her position as a colonial woman writer. In the third section, I focus more closely on one of Olive Schreiner's texts, The Story of an African Farm in an attempt to illustrate how allegory allows Olive Schreiner to reorder the unstable colonial space. Both realism and the adventure novel, I argue, assume a coherent and unified self. The colonial context, I suggest problematises this sense of self as individualist agent and in the figure of Lyndall I see the limits of the reflective self as a means of interacting with the colonial situation. Bibliography: pages 68-69.

The primary purpose of this thesis is to examine the autobiographical works of three Black South African women -- Mamphela Ramphele, Bessie Head, and Ellen Kuzwayo -- to see if and how they were impacted by the masculine discourse of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), which was articulated in terms of "the Black man" and his struggle. One of the first points I make and use as a premise throughout the thesis is that the term "man" is neither inclusive nor universal; it, instead, refers specifically to men and cannot refer to both men and women. What could have motivated the use of this masculinist language, particularly in light of the fact that the Nguni and Sotho languages of South Africa do not have a gender differentiation system for the third person pronoun? This question led me to an examination of the English language since English was the language chosen by the activists to conduct the business of the Movement. But, there was yet another factor to consider besides the language. The Black Consciousness Movement took place through the 1960s and into the late 1970s, during the latter part of an era of many other Black nationalist struggles around the world (Negritude, the U.S. Black Power Movements, liberation struggles of many of the other African countries). So, I look specifically at men's writings ' from Negritude and the Black Power Movements and compare them to a sample of writings from male writers in the Black Consciousness Movement, showing that all of these writers articulate employ this masculinist language. The significance of the timing of Black Consciousness (BC) is that it emerged into an international context with a readymade nationalist discourse of the liberation of Black people and the struggle of Black men. That discourse, however, might not have emerged if the usage of the masculine as universal were not already an acceptable practice the English language. Thus, the first chapter is an examination of the masculinity of the English language, primarily through feminist, postructuralist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist theories/theorists. The analysis begins from the premise that masculinity is a system of domination that requires femininity, a small, enclosed space designated for women. Key to the existence of masculinity and femininity is the facade that they are natural7 i.e., inherent to the male and female bodies, respectively. Thus the chapter is largely a deconstruction of that assumption, and the 18th century European assumption of a direct link between hysteria and femininity. I argue that at the base of female hysteria is a much more pervasive and normalised male hysteria, driven by the either/or binary logic of Western philosophy that shows itself in the English language. Indeed, it is masculinity, not femininity, that is irrational, illogical, and mad in its obsession for understanding and control. I move from that assertion into an analysis of how capitalism works to create femininity through Marx's structure of the non-producer, the labourer (to whom Marx consistently refers as he), and the product to examine the relationship between men and women, the masculine and the feminine. After establishing the madness of masculinity and its place in the English language, I move into how this examination of a Western context correlates to the Black Consciousness Movement. I argue that when the male BC activists entered into the English language, they simultaneously entered into its legacy of masculinity, and they adopted that masculinity. Thus their absenting of women was driven by the very same madness of masculinity. In the midst of this oppressive madness called masculinity, how, then did Black women conceive of themselves as agents? Of the three women, only one, Mamphela Ramphele, was an activist in the BCM. She is the onlywoman activist from the BCM who has written her autobiography, or who has written a sizeable body of material on her experience in the Movement. She is also the only of the three who never engages in the masculinist discourse of the Movement. I also look at Ellen Kuzwayo's autobiography, Call Me Woman7 which is dedicated to documenting the contributions of other Black women to the liberation of South Africa, despite which there are curious moments in the text when she slips into masculinist discourse in talking about the BCM and the importance of the Black man's struggle. The third is Bessie Head and her novel, A Question of Power7 which I use as an autobiographical text on the basis of her own admission that it is largely grounded in her own life experiences. Hers is an important text for the framework of madness it provides. I conclude that, true to my previous analyses, she is driven into madness by the hysteria of masculinity.